would
have been nice if he could have been taken with fever all alone at his
hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to write to his people,
to drive him out in convalescence. _Then_ they would be in possession of
the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack. It yet
somehow presented itself, this show, as too good to be spoiled; so that
they were reduced for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly
why--since they seemed to know a certain number of the same people--their
reunion had been so long averted. They didn't use that name for it, but
their delay from minute to minute to join the others was a kind of
confession that they didn't quite want it to be a failure. Their
attempted supposition of reasons for their not having met but showed how
little they knew of each other. There came in fact a moment when Marcher
felt a positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for
all the communities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old
friend that he saw she would have suited him. He had new ones enough--was
surrounded with them for instance on the stage of the other house; as a
new one he probably wouldn't have so much as noticed her. He would have
liked to invent something, get her to make-believe with him that some
passage of a romantic or critical kind _had_ originally occurred. He was
really almost reaching out in imagination--as against time--for something
that would do, and saying to himself that if it didn't come this sketch
of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They would
separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They would have
tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the turn, as he afterwards
made it out to himself, that, everything else failing, she herself
decided to take up the case and, as it were, save the situation. He felt
as soon as she spoke that she had been consciously keeping back what she
said and hoping to get on without it; a scruple in her that immensely
touched him when, by the end of three or four minutes more, he was able
to measure it. What she brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air
and supplied the link--the link it was so odd he should frivolously have
managed to lose.

"You know you told me something I've never forgotten and that again and
again has made me think of you since; it was that tremendously hot day
when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze. What I all